Discovered Hidden within iPhone’s Code Is a One-Handed Keyboard

Smartphones are becoming bigger, badder, and (usually) better thanks to rapid advancements in mobile technology. While larger phones offer plenty of benefits over their smaller counterparts, like superior batteries, and larger screens for watching HD videos; one drawback always remains. Larger phones make it more difficult, and sometimes impossible, for people to type text messages with one hand.

It’s not breaking news that Android devices from makers like Samsung and LG have offered one-handed keyboards for quite some time. However Android keyboards are typically a pain to use in general, no matter how many hands you’re using. At the end of the day, we’re sticking to our iPhones – no matter how difficult it might be to text with one hand because we know the iPhone is better than the alternative. However, with Apple’s ingenuity, there’s no reason the iPhone shouldn’t have a proper one-handed keyboard. Thankfully, a discovery in iPhone’s code suggests that Apple has been toying with the idea of a one-handed keyboard for years.

According to Engadget, “…since iOS 8 (at least), Apple has toyed with an edge-swipe activated one-hand keyboard. To keep characters closer to your thumb, it squishes character keys and expands copy and paste buttons, keeping the word prediction rail above the keys. Alas, it still remains unfinished and inaccessible, hidden away in the iPhone’s Xcode.”

While the shrunken keyboard might benefit users who wish to type one-handed, it seems that Apple hasn’t released the functionality due to the fact that it’s not ideal to simply reduce the size of a keyboard. Smaller keys scrunched to the side of the screen would increase the amount of typos one would make, metaphorically spitting in the face of Steve Jobs’ beloved and highly accurate keyboard design.

There is no word whether the one-handed keyboard will make its way to iOS; but we hope that Apple can come up with something innovative, easier to use, and an ultimately more accurate method than what we’re seeing above, because we know that they can.

Do you think this one-handed keyboard design is efficient? How would you improve this keyboard’s layout?
Let us know in the comments below!